On China (25 page)

Mao was not asking for Soviet help until American forces had been drawn deep into China—which he knew was not going to happen in the already completed scenario. Gromyko’s report from Beijing seems to have shocked Khrushchev. Though ambassadorial talks had already been agreed between Washington and Beijing, Khrushchev undertook two more steps to prevent nuclear war. To calm what he understood to be Beijing’s fear of American invasion, he offered to send Soviet antiaircraft units to Fujian.
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Beijing delayed a response and then accepted when the crisis was already over, provided that Soviet troops were placed under Chinese command—an improbable outcome.
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In a further demonstration of his nervousness, Khrushchev sent another letter to Eisenhower on September 19, urging restraint but warning of the imminence of nuclear war.
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Except that China and the United States had, in fact, already settled the issue before Khrushchev’s second letter arrived.

In their meeting on October 3, 1959, Khrushchev had summed up the Soviet attitude during the Taiwan crises to Mao:

Khrushchev had enabled Mao to lure him into so futile a course by trying to be both clever and cynical. Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat. On Taiwan, Mao used Khrushchev’s ambivalence to entice him into making a nuclear threat that he had admitted he had no intention of carrying out, straining Moscow’s relationship with the United States on behalf of an issue Khrushchev considered unimportant and of an allied leader who despised him.

One can only imagine Mao’s bemusement: he had goaded Moscow and Washington into threatening nuclear war against each other over some of the world’s least vital geopolitical real estate in what was an essentially nonmilitary piece of Chinese political theater. Moreover, Mao had done so at a time of his choosing, while China remained vastly weaker than the United States or the USSR, and in a manner that allowed him to claim a significant propaganda victory and rejoin Sino-U.S. ambassadorial talks from what his propaganda would claim was a position of strength.

Having triggered the crisis and brought it to a close, Mao asserted that he had achieved his objectives:

Zhou Enlai offered an even more complicated assessment. He saw the second Taiwan Strait Crisis as a demonstration of the ability of the two Chinese parties to engage in tacit bargaining with each other across the barriers of opposing ideologies and even while the nuclear powers were fencing about nuclear war. Nearly fifteen years later, Zhou recounted Beijing’s strategy to Richard Nixon during the President’s 1972 visit to Beijing:

These brilliant achievements must be balanced against the global impact of the crisis, however. The ambassadorial talks deadlocked almost as soon as they resumed. Mao’s ambiguous maneuvers, in fact, froze Sino-American relations into an adversarial posture from which they did not recover for over a decade. The notion that China was determined to eject the United States from the Western Pacific grew into an article of faith in Washington that deprived both sides of options for a more flexible diplomacy.

The impact on the Soviet leadership was the opposite of what Mao had intended. Far from abandoning the policy of peaceful coexistence, Moscow was panicked by Mao’s rhetoric and unsettled by his nuclear brinkmanship, his repeated musing on the likely positive effects of nuclear war for world socialism, and his failure to consult Moscow. In the aftermath of the crisis, Moscow suspended nuclear cooperation with Beijing, and in June of 1959 withdrew its commitment to provide China with a model atomic bomb. In 1960, Khrushchev withdrew Russian technicians from China and canceled all aid projects, claiming that “[we] couldn’t simply stand by, allowing some of our best-qualified specialists—people who’d been trained in our own agriculture and industry—to receive nothing but harassment in exchange for their help.”
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Internationally Mao achieved another demonstration of China’s hair-trigger response to perceived threats to its national security or territorial integrity. This would discourage attempts by China’s neighbors to exploit the domestic upheaval into which Mao was about to plunge his society. But it also started a process of progressive isolation that would cause Mao to rethink his foreign policy a decade later.

D
URING THE FIRST DECADE of the People’s Republic of China’s existence, its tough leaders navigated the decrepit empire they had conquered and turned it into a major power internationally. The second decade was dominated by Mao’s attempt to accelerate the continuous revolution at home. The driving force of continuous revolution was Mao’s maxim that moral and ideological vigor would overcome physical limitations. The decade began and ended amidst domestic turmoil that was ordered by China’s own leaders. So encompassing was this crisis that China shut itself off from the rest of the world; almost all its diplomats were recalled to Beijing. Two complete overhauls of China’s domestic structure took place: first of the economy, with the Great Leap Forward at the beginning of the decade; and second, of the social order, with the Cultural Revolution at the end. Diplomacy was out of fashion; but war was not. When Mao felt the national interest challenged, in the midst of all its self-inflicted travail, China stood up once again, to go to war at its furthest western frontier in the inhospitable Himalayas.

China’s leaders had felt obliged by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to confront the issue of what, absent claims to a Party Chairman’s godlike infallibility, constituted Communist political legitimacy. In the months following the February 1956 speech, they seemed to feel their way toward making their own governance more transparent, presumably to avoid the need for periodic shocks of rectification. Worshipful references to Mao Zedong were deleted from the Communist Party constitution. The Party adopted resolutions cautioning against “rash advance” in the economic field and suggesting that the main phase of “class struggle” would now draw to a close.
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But such a prosaic approach quickly clashed with Mao’s vision of continuous revolution. Within months Mao proposed an alternative route to political rectification: the Chinese Communist Party would invite debate and criticism of its methods and open up China’s intellectual and artistic life to let “one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao’s exact motives in issuing this call remain a subject of debate. The Hundred Flowers Campaign has been explained as either a sincere call for the Party to cut through its bureaucratic isolation to hear directly from the people or a stratagem to coax enemies into identifying themselves. Whatever the motive, popular criticism quickly moved beyond suggestions for tactical adjustments into criticisms of the Communist system. Students set up a “democracy wall” in Beijing. Critics protested the abuses of local officials and the privations imposed by Soviet-style economic policies; some contrasted the first decade of Communist rule unfavorably with the Nationalist era that preceded it.
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Whatever the original intention, Mao never brooked a challenge to his authority for long. He executed a sharp about-face and justified it as an aspect of his dialectic approach. The Hundred Flowers movement was transformed into an “Anti-Rightist Campaign” to deal with those who had misunderstood the limits of the earlier invitation to debate. A massive purge led to the imprisonment, reeducation, or internal exile of thousands of intellectuals. At the end of the process, Mao stood again as China’s unchallenged leader, having cleared the field of his critics. He used his preeminence to accelerate the continuous revolution, turning it into the Great Leap Forward.

The 1957 Moscow conference of socialist parties had found Mao issuing a fateful claim about Chinese economic development. Responding to Khrushchev’s prediction that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States economically in fifteen years, Mao delivered an impromptu speech proclaiming that China would surpass Great Britain in steel production in the same interval.
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This comment soon acquired the status of a directive. The fifteen-year steel target—subsequently reduced, in a series of largely extemporaneous remarks, to
three
years
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—was matched by a series of similarly ambitious agricultural goals. Mao was preparing to launch China’s continuous revolution into a more active phase and to confront the Chinese people with its most stupendous challenge yet.

Like many of Mao’s undertakings, the Great Leap Forward combined aspects of economic policy, ideological exaltation, and foreign policy. For Mao, these were not distinct fields of endeavor but interrelated strands of the grand project of the Chinese revolution.
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In its most literal sense, the Great Leap Forward was designed to carry out Mao’s sweeping ideas of industrial and agricultural development. Much of China’s remaining private property and individual incentives were eliminated as the country was reorganized into “people’s communes” pooling possessions, food, and labor. Peasants were conscripted in quasi-military brigades for massive public works projects, many improvised.

These projects had international as well as domestic implications—especially with respect to the conflict with Moscow. If successful, the Great Leap Forward would rebut Moscow’s prescriptions of gradualism and effectively relocate the ideological center of the Communist world to China. When Khrushchev visited Beijing in 1958, Mao insisted that China would achieve full Communism before the Soviet Union did, while the Soviet Union had opted for a slower, more bureaucratic, and less inspirational route of development. To Soviet ears, this was a shocking ideological heresy.

But for once, Mao had set a challenge so far outside the realm of objective reality that even the Chinese people fell short of its achievement. The Great Leap Forward’s production goals were exorbitant, and the prospect of dissent or failure was so terrifying that local cadres took to falsifying their output figures and reporting inflated totals to Beijing. Taking these reports literally, Beijing continued to export grain to the Soviet Union in exchange for heavy industry and weaponry. Compounding the disaster was that Mao’s steel targets had been implemented so literally as to encourage the melting down of useful implements as scrap to fulfill the quotas. Yet, in the end, the laws of nature and economics could not be abrogated, and the Great Leap Forward’s reckoning was brutal. From 1959 to 1962, China experienced one of the worst famines in human history, leading to the deaths of over twenty million people.
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Mao had again called on the Chinese people to move mountains, but this time the mountains had not moved.

By 1962, barely a decade after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, China had fought a war with the United States in Korea and engaged in two military confrontations involving the United States over the offshore islands of Taiwan. It had restored Chinese authority to imperial China’s historic frontiers (with the exception of Mongolia and Taiwan) by reoccupying Xinjiang and Tibet. The famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward had barely been overcome. Nevertheless, Mao did not shrink from another military conflict when he considered China’s definition of its historic borders was being challenged by India.

The Sino-Indian border crisis concerned two territories located in the high Himalayas in the trackless and largely uninhabitable region of plateaus amidst forbidding mountains between Tibet and India. Fundamentally, the issue arose over the interpretation of colonial history.

China claimed the imperial boundaries along the southern foothills of the Himalayas, encompassing what China considered “South Tibet” but which India administered as the state of Arunachal Pradesh. The Indian perception was of relatively recent vintage. It had evolved out of the British effort to demarcate a dividing line with the Russian Empire advancing toward Tibet. The final relevant document was between Britain and Tibet, signed in 1914, that delineated the border in the eastern sector, called the McMahon Line after the principal British negotiator.

China had a long relationship with Tibet. The Mongols had conquered both Tibet and the Chinese agricultural heartland in the same wave of conquest in the thirteenth century, bringing them into close political contact. Later the Qing Dynasty had regularly intervened in Tibet to expel the forces of other non-Han peoples making incursions into Tibet from the north and west. Eventually Beijing settled into a form of suzerainty exercised by “imperial residents” in Lhasa. Beijing, since the Qing Dynasty, treated Tibet as part of the All Under Heaven ruled by the Chinese Emperor and reserved the right to eject hostile interlopers; but distance and the Tibetans’ nomadic culture made full Sinicization impractical. In this manner, Tibetans were afforded a substantial degree of autonomy over their day-to-day life.